Official Blog of Author MICHAEL THOMAS BARRY.
A blog which discusses varied topics that are related to the authors many books. Michael is a columnist for CrimeMagazine.com and a reviewer for the New York Journal of Books.
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Tuesday, February 26, 2013

British Poet George Barker was born - 1913

On February 26, 1913, British poet and novelist George Granville Barker was born Loughton, Essex, England. Barker
was the elder brother of painter Kit Barker. Having left school at an early age
he pursued several odd jobs before settling on a career in writing. Early
volumes of note by Barker include Thirty Preliminary Poems (1933), Poems
(1935) and Calamiterror (1937), which was inspired by the Spanish Civil
War. In his early twenties, Barker had already been published by T.S. Eliot at Faber
and Faber, who also helped him to gain appointment as Professor of English
Literature in 1939 at Tohoku University in Japan. He left there in 1940 due to
the hostilities, but wrote Pacific Sonnets during his tenure. He then
travelled to the U.S. where he began his longtime liaison with writer Elizabeth
Smart, by whom he had four of his fifteen children. Barker also had three
children by his first wife, Jessica. He returned to England in 1943. From the
late 1960s until his death, he lived in Norfolk. In 1969, he published the poem
At Thurgarton Church.Barker's
1950 novel, The Dead Seagull, described his affair with Smart, whose
1945 novel By Grand Central Station I Sat
Down and Wept was also written about the affair. His Collected Poemswere edited by Robert Frost and
published in 1987 by Faber and Faber. Barker died on October 27, 1991.

Michael Thomas
Barry is the author of Great Britain’s Literary Legends. His book can be
purchased from Amazon through the following links: